Email Spam: Email Harvesting

We have covered email spam protection, and what you should do to protect yourself against it, and we have had a humorous story of what would happen if you reply to ALL email spam offers, but what do you do if you need to publish publicly, a valid email address on the web? Let's find the best ways to stop email harvesting.

Domain Name Email Harvesting & Spamming

The DNS (Domain Name Server) System is a wonderful tool. Not only does it point your domain name (www.yoursite.com) to your host (the computer your website is actually running on), it also gives a record of who actually owns the domain name and how to contact the individuals involved with it. A WHOIS Server is used to query the information stored in the DNS System. The trouble is, that this information is not only available to those people that genuinely need to access it, but it also available to the Spammer.

Spammers are very interested in newly registered domain names. Why? It is because the contact information registered against the domain name is ... new! It has current up to date information, meaning that all email addresses in the domain record are live and 'active'. If the Spammer sends an email to one of those email addresses, then there is almost a 100% chance that it will end up in someones inbox and be read.

Website Email Harvesting & Spamming

Spammers use technology similar to Search Engines to get email addresses from websites. Search Engines use spiders (also known as search-bots), to catalog and index every significant word on your web page so that information can be found. Spammers do the same, but they are looking purely for email addresses. They search for an '@' symbol or a 'mailto:' anchor on each webpage, and then scan for everything before it and after it that forms an email address.

Email Harvesting Protection

Domain email spam harvesting protection
To protect yourself against having your domain name details harvested, you should contact a web site professional that can help you to get the best domain name for you (without you having to spend days finding if each one is taken or not), and a professional who also knows how to make all of your domain contact information private. This needs to be done when the domain name is first registered or else the email addresses will get spammed. To make the details private but is still available to those who really need it, is usually accomplished via proxies.

WebSite email harvesting protection
In order to stop spammers from harvesting email addresses from your website we need to stop their spiders (or spam-bots). But how do you let people see the email address without the spammers robots seeing the addresses?

Here are a few methods;

• Avoid use of 'mailto:'
  don't use a 'mailto:' anchor in your email address link on your webpage as this is a magnet for the spammers bots. Eg. Don't use something like; '<a href="mailto:yourname@yourdomain.com">Email me</a>'
   
• Character Spacing
  Try inserting spaces in your email address so 'yourname@yourdomain.com' becomes
  'y o u r n a m e @ y o u r d o m a i n . c o m'
   
• Email Sentence
  You can instead write 'yourname@yourdomain.com' as a sentence like 'yourname at yourdomain dot com'.
   
• HTML Characters
  Use HTML characters instead. In the HTML text of the web page change the '@' to '&#64;' and the '.' to '&#46;' so you could write 'yourname@yourdomain.com' as 'yourname&#64;yourdomain&#46;com'
  they would both look exactly the same.
   
• Graphic Text
  Try opening your favorite graphics editer and make a small picture (GIF) that has your email address stored as an image.
  
   
• Obscure or Obfuscate the email address.
  This is similar to the HTML character method above, but is far more powerful as it maintains all look and feel of original links. You can use javascript to write directly to the screen on display. This is the method we use for all of the web pages we design for our clients. Most designers don't do this as it takes extra effort and the client doesn't know any better. We take the extra care. Examples of obfuscation can be seen when you click on any of the email addresses when you contact us.